Last week Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn demonstrated why, come Nov. 4, he'll be a solid candidate for re-election. His State of the State address was boilerplate Quinn: He came off as an approachable pol who can boast of signing pension reforms. He can massage economic data in ways to argue that Illinois and its state government are on the mend. We wrote afterward that his Republican challengers, by contrast, seemed more focused on their intramural spitting match than on presenting a specific and coherent alternative to the Democratic incumbent.

We saw a different crew when the four Republicans met on Monday with the Tribune Editorial Board. This was a crisp debate that offered promise — regardless of who wins in the primary — of a fall election campaign that will focus on competing Democratic and GOP narratives on how to pull this state out of its economic doldrums.

The Republican field offers someone for almost everyone who'll vote in the March 18 Illinois primary. Each candidate is playing a game different from the others. One of them, state Treasurer Dan Rutherford, is playing poorly in a time of crisis for him and his campaign.

You can watch a video of the session at chicagotribune.com/gopwebcast. Maybe you'll be mesmerized by specific responses — this guy had a good answer on X, that guy really tried to dodge Y. That's how most of us watch politicians joust: Questions about specific issues bring order to debates the way innings bring order to baseball games. But when we looked beyond individual answers to what each of the four projects, here's what we saw up close. We won't decide for several weeks which of the four we'll endorse. We'll discuss them here alphabetically:

State Sen. Bill Brady, the Republican nominee for governor in 2010, comes across as a candidate who knows he got trapped in a campaign that focused on his hard-right stand on social issues four years ago. He's marketing himself now as a "consistent but cautious conservative" who has championed pension reform and other financially responsible causes. He knows Springfield, he knows business, and when the income tax rollback of January 2015 cuts state revenue by $4 billion a year, or nearly 10 percent, he would confront legislative leaders: "Here's our number, (and our budget has to meet it)." How he would convince majority Democrats to slash billions in spending remains undefined. He eventually wants to eliminate the state income tax, and says job creation can produce enough new revenue to sustain state government. This is a less bumptious, more focused Brady than the Brady of 2010.

State Sen. Kirk Dillard, too, knows his way around Springfield. If you hadn't heard, he worked for Gov. Jim Edgar, a name that evidently still polls well, because Dillard utters it at every opportunity. If you think today's General Assembly would warm to a cordial Republican who knows everyone's first name, Dillard wants to be your candidate. He has shown he can work with Chicago Democrats, he says, but needs to be governor before he can engineer the "monumental changes" Illinois needs. He sees big savings in culling from the Medicaid rolls recipients who aren't eligible for benefits. And he sounds willing to accept — temporarily, he stresses, until he can restructure state finances — income tax rates that don't roll back as scheduled. Hmm. A temporary extension of a tax hike that Democrats sold as temporary is a tough sell. Not to worry: What Dillard's really selling is his ability to effect change within the Springfield status quo.

Businessman Bruce Rauner is riding a very different wave: He scorns the insider maneuverability that Brady, Dillard and Rutherford have spent their careers burnishing. Rauner is a rare commodity in an Illinois gubernatorial race, a conservative populist less interested in surviving among Illinois' power players than in tapping the electorate's anger. He's a man accustomed to giving orders that get obeyed; he couldn't effectively tell us how he would bring Springfield to heel on such iconoclastic ideas as moving state employees from pensions to 401(k)-style accounts. Rauner says "Mitch Daniels" — the former Indiana governor is his idol — as giddily as Dillard cites Edgar. Rauner says Springfield is a study in "bipartisan failure"; the Illinois GOP is "a soft subsidiary of the Democratic Party" that would rather live on crumbs than fight the war of principle he intends to wage against today's power structure.